James M. Buchanan is advisory deneral director of the Center for the Study of Public Choice and distinguished professor emeritus of economics at George Mason University, as well as distinguished professor of economics and philosophy at Virginia Tech.

Winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Science “for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making,” Buchanan is the author, co-author, or editor of more than two dozen books and several hundred professional papers. Among his most important works are Fiscal Theory and Political Economy, The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock), The Limits of Liberty, Democracy in Deficit (with Richard Wagner), The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (with Geoffrey Brennan), and The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy (with Geoffrey Brennan).

Buchanan received the Seidman Prize in Political Economy in 1984 as well as 15 honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He has served as president of the Southern and Western Economic associations and Mont Pelerin Society and vice president of the American Economic Association. Buchanan was the cofounder, with Warren Nutter, of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy at the University of Virginia, and also co-founder, with Gordon Tullock, of what later became the Public Choice Society.

Buchanan is a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato Institute.

Related Essays by James M. Buchanan from the Cato Institute

James M. Buchanan, “Notes on the Liberal Constitution,” Cato Journal, Volume 14 Number 1, Spring/Summer 1994.

James M. Buchanan, “Federalism and Individual Sovereignty,” Cato Journal , Volume 15 Number 2-3, Fall/Winter 1996.

James M. Buchanan “An American Perspective on Europe’s Constitutional Opportunity,” Cato Journal, Volume 10 Number 3, Winter 1991.

James M. Buchanan, “Reductionist Reflections on the Monetary Constitution,” Cato Journal, Volume 9 Number 2, Fall 1989.

James M. Buchanan, “Justification of the Compound Republic: The Calculus in Retrospect,” Cato Journal, Volume 7 Number 2, Fall 1987.